Kerry, under fire

Name one high-profile issue that’s going well right now for Secretary of State John Kerry.

Russian troops are still sitting on the Ukrainian border, and Russian-backed militants haven’t backed off inside the country. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is still taking Kerry’s calls, but not seeming to care much about what’s being said.

Kerry’s attempted peace process reboot between the Israelis and Palestinians has stalled out.

And then, “apartheid” — what the future could hold for Israel without a peace deal, he warned in a closed door meeting last week.

In a defiant apology of sorts that fired back at those who questioned his support for Israel, the nation’s top diplomat acknowledged “the power of words to create misimpression, even when unintentional.”

Kerry’s been confronted with this lesson throughout his career in public life, repeatedly getting caught in impolitic descriptions of what he would argue are just realistic assessments of where things stand. This is the politician, after all, who famously explained his procedural maneuver on Iraq War funding as, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” — a true, and in his mind defensible, position that proved poison to his 2004 campaign.

Once again, he’s fed a problematic narrative about himself as a man who goes knee deep with his foot in his mouth, and a larger narrative of an Obama administration foreign policy that’s stumbling and in trouble — which the president defended over the weekend as “you hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.”

State Department officials say Kerry is undeterred.

“This guy is absolutely locked in, unafraid of bumps in the road, and he always jokes, ‘What are they gonna do — send me to Vietnam?’ said a senior official close to the secretary. “Now the proof is in the pugilism. Kerry has spent a lifetime in the arena, and that’s where he’ll stay.”

Even as Kerry and Obama have brought together allied international action on Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere, his administration has been under attack at home and abroad for not being better able to showcase strength or effectiveness toward Russia and Syria.

Amid that criticism, Kerry is the face of the administration foreign policy, whether announcing the preliminary breakthrough with Iran in November — still moving forward, at least for now — or standing in Geneva again two weeks ago to cautiously accept the basic agreement with the Russians, now proven useless, to de-escalate Ukraine.

And then there’s his own decision to making a renewed Middle East peace effort a central mission, which continues to have Obama’s support and which hasn’t been affected by the “apartheid” comment or the response it’s generated.

Kerry sees progress on multiple fronts, say aides, from moving toward the May 25 elections in Ukraine or planning for the two-and-a-half years ahead of him to make progress on the peace process. And that doesn’t count many issues gaining less attention, from attempting to stabilize Egypt to tackling the genocide in South Sudan, which he’ll be addressing on a trip to Africa this week.

“He’s not looking for a quick sugar fix, he’s looking for a way to keep making progress, keep chipping away,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

“On Syria, he knows we’ve rid 92 percent of the chemical weapons from Syria, but he won’t be content until we’re at 100 percent and Assad is gone. On the Middle East peace process, he knows that there are ups and downs but the two parties always end up determined to get back to the negotiating table. On Ukraine, he feels liberated to blast the Russians and he knows that exhausting the diplomatic process brought reluctant Europeans to finally get tough on sanctions,” the official close to Kerry said.

The “apartheid” furor is one that in the minds of the State Department is playing out purely within the American political context, and is likely to disappear just as quickly as it arrived.